Cashing in on formula is not and never has been the sole domain of Marvel Comics. Colonel Tom Parker, the real villain of every bad Elvis movie, recognized how a recycled cinematic blueprint could yield box office from the moment he first trotted his Mississippi-born cash cow out in front of the cameras wearing a Hawaiian shirt. “Blue Hawaii” was not Elvis’s finest couple hours on screen, but it was the most successful, and the most pretty to look at, and came equipped with a strong soundtrack. So for much of his remaining acting career, Elvis was forced to star in “Blue Hawaii”-esque re-treads, combining songs with scenery and lilting co-stars. As the quality dipped, his on screen interest waned.
“Paradise, Hawaiian Style” was released in 1966, two years before his mammoth NBC Comeback Special, which naturally meant he needed something from which to come back. There was a whole lotta something, sure, but “Paradise, Hawaiian Style” was as emblematic a reason as any. The man who let loose on Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right (Mama)” only twelve years hence was reduced to rhapsodizing “Queenie Wahine’s Papaya” in a film so slack it practically evaporates right there on the screen. If the King had been a canoe in this exercise of blah, he would have been capsized, floating along with the current, letting it take him wherever, because whatever.
He stars as Rick Richards, the least-inspiring character name in an IMDB profile otherwise littered with inspiring character names, instantly suggesting not so much carefree as I-Don’t-Care. Indeed, Elvis looks like he doesn’t care. The pounds he has accumulated since his svelte “Blue Hawaii” self are noticeable and so are the attempts by director Michael Moore to try and disguise them. When he breaks into song, as he must, there is no cover story given, not even an unconvincing bare bones anecdote, to explain his crooning and hula dancing. We’re past the point, apparently, of “explanation”; “Paradise, Hawaiian Style” simply arrives intact.
Rick Richards actually has moderate gristle on his bones, if only the cocktail napkin on which the so-called screenplay was sketched over guava drinks wanted to do anything with it. Whereas the Chad Gates of “Blue Hawaii” was a G.I. returning home and a young man standing up to his father’s misplaced wishes to join the family business, Rick is less than noble. He is irresponsible, a pugnacious flirt, which he is why he gets fired from his airline job and casts off to the islands. Once there, he concocts a helicopter charter business with his pal Kohana (James Shigeta, whose incessant incredulous looks aimed Elvis’s way are the best thing in the whole movie), a business scheme that hews awful close to his tour guide business in “Blue Hawaii” aside from actual devotion to the job. Every decision Rick makes stems directly from skirt-cashing, and every skirt he chases puts his fledgling company and his pal’s backing in serious danger. Rick hardly cares and that fecklessness matches Elvis’s.
We aren’t supposed to care either. We’re supposed to string up a hammock in our living room and watch with a nary care in the world, imbibing the attractive photography, the sand & the surf, and smiling at the rendition of “Aloha O’e”, which is a pretty tough song to screw up even if you’re one of the Elvis Impersonators from “Honeymoon in Vegas”. But to simply sluff it off is to ignore the idea that moviemaking disasters don’t always have to light up the screen with their wasted money and undercooked “ideas”. No, sometimes a silver screen disaster is glimpsed in nothing more than the painfully bored body language of its star, one who may be in paradise but wishes he was anywhere else in the world.
“(The Golden Gate Bridge) needs neither praise, eulogy nor encomium,” said Joseph Straus in May 1937 the day the 4200 foot suspension span was officially unveiled to the public. “It speaks for itself.” And he’s totally right. It does. To see it is to understand the awesome sway it holds. And yet, to speak is human, and to see The Golden Gate, shining in the sun or shrouded in the fog, one finds him or herself desperate to verbally convey its majesty, like Herb Caen fifty years later: “The mystical structure, with its perfect amalgam of delicacy and power, exerts an uncanny effect. Its efficiency cannot conceal the artistry. There is heart there, and soul. It is an object to be contemplated for hours.”
In August of 2001, during my solo sojourn through the state of California, I contemplated it for hours. I walked up and down it twice. I leaned on the east railing and gazed at the bay. I leaned on the west railing and gazed at the Pacific. I gazed up at it from a beach to the south. I gazed down at it from a vista on the Marin County side. That, I learned several months later, was the same vantage point from where Freddie Prinze Jr. gave his generally undistinguishable “I love you” speech to Claire Forlani in the wholly disposable “Boys and Girls.” Forlani’s eyes are the most alluring in the business but even I struggled to make contact with them when such striking orange vermillion hovered just over her shoulder.
Films favor staggering backdrops and what could be more staggering? When I saw the Golden Gate in “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home” on Christmas Day 1986 I couldn’t believe how much sense it made that future Starfleet Federation would have made its headquarters in the city by the bay and, specifically, right by the bridge. What, were they gonna put it in the District of Columbia? Pfffffft. The Washington Monument is swell and the Lincoln Monument is peachy keen and Dumbarton Oaks is exorbitantly underrated but the District’s punching out of its sight-seeing weight class against the GG.
Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and film directors and movie producers often see the Golden Gate less for its eye-popping visuals and more for its ability to get destroyed. It shows up in the trailer for the forthcoming “San Andreas” as getting wiped away. It showed up in last year’s “Godzilla” so that Godzilla could Godzilla it. It showed up in “Pacific Rim” to get stomped to smithereens. It showed up in “Terminator: Salvation” already destroyed. It showed up in “X Men: The Last Stand” to get destroyed because Brett Ratner has no respect for anything good and decent in this world. It showed up in “The Core” to get ripped in half. Etc. Maybe, like the US Capitol getting blown up by aliens or Lady Liberty’s head left to wither away in the sand, destroying the Golden Gate Bridge is Hollywood’s way. Or maybe it speaks to some deep-seated relationship we all carry with it.
My favorite implementation of her land-spanning majesty is in Gore Verbinski’s “The Lone Ranger”, that tepidly received box office failure that is far from perfect but so much more than a Rotten Tomato. It is a story of How the West Was (Actually) Won tucked into something more summer blockbuster-y, an imperfect spectacle, a testament to the excess of both Hollywood and America. And it opens with a shot that will stop your heart – The Golden Gate Bridge under construction. It is CGI’d, of course, because it has to be, but there is something emblematic in that CGI, an unintentional explication of technology betraying the expedient evolution of our society. Look real close and you can essentially see an iPhone cord tethering Silicon Valley to Jamestown.
In discussing The Golden Gate for its seventy-fifth anniversary, California Historical Society executive director Anthea Hartig told The Atlantic: “I've come to see the bridge as a series of moments of remarkable bravery, chutzpah, and hubris. Man over nature, the great crown of the gateway, and the great crown of imperialism after the closing of the American frontier. We are looking to the Pacific. And we are putting a crown at the edge of the continent.” In the context of the colossal movie to come, that’s what this opening shot represents, the crown at the edge of the continent,the architectural exclamation point to a continental colonization. “It seems to be taken from a postapocalyptic political disaster movie,” Richard Brody wrote of the shot, as if its intention was not to herald the future but caution against it.
The film’s chief heavy, Latham Cole (Tom Wilkinson), outlines his master plan before a banner reading “A Nation United”, a diabolical ribbing of the notion that this land was made for you and me and everybody else. “The Lone Ranger,” as Andrew O’Hehir wrote, “never lets you forget that the Manifest Destiny that drove Anglo-American society across our continent was a thin veneer pasted across a series of genocidal crimes.” And maybe that’s why every filmmaker wants to destroy the bridge. It might be unrivaled for pictorial marvelousness, yet its very presence embodies the excessive cost of the collectivism of westward expansion. By tearing it down, we can dream of starting again.
And so the release date of “San Andreas” draws nearer. We here at Cinema Romantico are over-the-moon anticipatory for Brad Peyton’s CGI spectacle of the earthquake to end the Earthquake. Not because of the movie itself, mind you. Ha! That’s kooky talk! No, we are excited to finally find out just who in the hell our beloved Kylie Minogue will be playing. We know she’s playing someone named “Susan Riddick” and that Ioan Gruffudd is playing someone named “Daniel Riddick” because IMDB tells us so, but beyond that……nothing. We have scoured the Internet, believe us, for traces of Susan Riddick’s character DNA and come up empty. And yet, in the wake of the obligatorily glitzy film premiere, one clue trickled in from the Twitters in the form of a Tweet from New Idea Magazine's Associate Editor, Matthew Denby.
5 Theories for Kylie Minogue's Final Line of San Andreas Dialogue
Better the Devil You Know. Susan Riddick, famed seismologist, gives the keynote address at a conference regarding the potential of “an Earthquake Storm.” “This,” she explains, “is a cataclysmic series of earthquakes spread out over many years. Yet our recent models show an increasing likelihood that this storm could, in fact, catastrophically take place over a period of several weeks rather than years, a scientific anomaly not unlike the one featured in Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow.” Less than 24 hours later, the storm is unleashed. A colleague looks at Susan Riddick in their chic laboratory and remarks, ominously, “It's happening just like you said it would.” Susan Riddick shrugs: “Better the Devil You Know.” The floor collapses and they plummet to their ultimate demise.
Never Too Late. As if trucked in from a bad Hallmark movie, Susan Riddick is a married mother of three who, lately, has been devoting far too much to getting ahead on the corporate ladder, working late and on weekends, forgetting her daughter's recital and her son's track meet. When her husband speaks, her mind drifts to the quarterly financials. Her life, you might say, is in need of a shake-up. She gets it. On the way to her other son's soccer game where she's supposed to have the halftime treats she has forgotten the last 22 soccer games in a row, the great quake hits. Fatally wounded, she still somehow straggles though a decimated city and to the soccer field where she hands out treats to injured kids and parents. “You remembered,” her other son says. “It's never too late,” she says with her final breath.
Go Hard or Go Home. Susan Riddick, three time 24 Hours of Le Mans champion, is in San Francisco for a road race and in traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge with her manager when the quake strikes. As the Golden Gate is torn free from the Marin Headlands, thereby leaving nowhere to flee, Susan Riddick guns the engine anyway. Her manager, panicked, screams “There's no way you can make that jump!” to which Susan Riddick replies, grinning, “Go Hard or Go Home.” They don't make it.
Your Disco Needs You. Susan & Daniel Riddick are a faded Disco Power Couple. And with disco having faded from popular consciousness, their marriage has crashed on the rocks along with their love of Donna Summer (their mentor). But, as “San Andreas” opens, they have a chance run-in with nu-disco mogul Hans-Peter Lindstrøm (as himself). Susan feels herself being swayed to the good side of the force. Daniel, not so much. Yet in a moving sequence, as she takes to the dance floor and becomes lost in the rhythm, feeling space, she pleads for Daniel to join her. He resists. “Don't you see?!” she cries. “Your disco needs you!” Alas, the quake strikes, the dance floor collapses and Susan falls into the void. Daniel, after mourning, realizes his disco does need him and teams up with Lindstrøm for an epic album made in Susan's honor. His song bearing her name opens the Earthquake Benefit of 2015. The film bombs in America. It does gangbusters in Berlin.
Je Ne Sais Pas Pourquoi. In the midst of earthquake chaos, Emma (Carla Gugino) looks to Susan Riddick. Emma: “Do you remember why you wanted to do this movie?” Susan Riddick: “Je Ne Sais Pas Pourquoi.” A CGI steel beam falls on top of Susan Riddick. Emma looks to the sky and screams: “Take me too! TAKE ME TOO!!!!!!!”
The venerable Interwebs domain Grantland has a semi-regular series called Bragging Rights wherein they “determine which member of a cast, a team, a band, or a presidential cabinet is killing it the most, years later.” Last week, their resident college football scribe, the wonderful Holly Anderson, examined who was killing it most in Paul Verhoeven’s cult classic “Starship Troopers” (1997). And she did a respectable job. She parsed out a Gold Medal to Neil Patrick Harris, a Silver Medal to Sugar Watkins – er, Seth Gilliam, a Bronze Medal to Dean Norris. You might think, them? But then, the goal of Bragging Rights is to determine who’s killing it most right now; not who was killing it most in that movie. And that’s no fun. So NPH hosted the Oscars? So what? How did he do stacked up against Patrick Muldoon saying “jarheads”? Not too good, I’m afraid, and that’s all we care about here at Cinema Romantico.
So, today Cinema Romantico answers Grantland’s “Starship Troopers” Bragging Rights with “Starship Troopers” License to Boast, a determination of which member of the cast was killing it the most, right then.
Gold Medal: Dina Meyer. “Starship Troopers” is the certified all-time favorite movie of my friend, former roommate and venerated road comic Daryl A. Moon. I once spent a 4th of July with Daryl consuming rum like Captain Jack Sparrow while he showed myself and other (un)willing guests “Starship Troopers” one frame at a time like Roger Ebert at the Conference on World Affairs. Thus, I went straight to the nation’s foremost “Starship Troopers” source in order to properly hail the victor. I asked Daryl why Dina Meyer's Dizzy Flores was awesome. He answered…
“Sometimes a movie character is a great athlete (for example, good enough to play Jumpball professionally for either Rio or Tokyo). Sometimes a character is humble (not jealous that another player makes captain of the team despite the first character’s professional-quality abilities). Sometimes a character is determined to be with the person they love no matter what the cost (abandoning said professional career to follow the object of their affection into the military). Sometimes a character is part of a massive military invasion and, despite the overwhelming victory of the other side, manages to make it back (surviving the invasion of Big K). Sometimes a character finally admits their true feelings to the person they love and doesn’t get upset when the other person doesn’t love them back (making due when he just smiles). Sometimes a character uses their could-have-gone-pro athletic skills to save everyone in their unit (throwing a grenade into the tanker bug’s mouth during the battle on Planet P). Sometimes a character must suffer a major assault in order to stir the sympathies of the audience (the conclusion of the attack on Planet P). Sometimes a character has one of the most preposterous death scenes in film history, yet still breaks your heart by trying to comfort the person they love (in the transport back to the Rodger Young). But only one time has a character made claim to all of these, and that is why Dizzy Flores is awesome.”
Silver Medal: Michael Ironside. Mr. Ironside will always be Jester to me, so it says something that even in a cast of such soaring low-rollers, he ascends to such noteworthy heights. There’s, like, seven actors who could properly annunciate the line “They sucked his brains out.” He’s one.
Bronze Medal: Brenda Strong. Paul Verhoeven might not be a feminist but he's damn sure fair-minded, in his own way. And I think we know this because of Strong's Capt. Deladia. She's just sort of...there. It's not a big deal that she's a Captain; it just is. And in Strong's subtle but strengthened manner you can tell she's grooming Denise Richards' Carmen Ibanez to be her successor. Plus, she's the only “Starship Troopers” character to also appear in the much lamented sequel “Starship Troopers 2: Hero Federation.” Well, not really. Really Capt. Deladia died and Strong is playing a different character called Sgt. Dede Rake. But I don't believe that for a minute. Sgt. Dede Rake is Capt. Deladia reincarnated through some sort of mystical Jainism-like Ed Neumeier-ism. And we all know it.
Val Barker Trophy: Christopher Curry. This is a trophy presented to the one Olympic boxer who during the course of the two week competition most exemplifies “style.” And so, we present the “Starship Troopers” version of the Val Barker Trophy to the one actor who most exemplifies style. And that actor, undoubtedly, is Christopher Curry as Johnny Rico’s dad, the guy who says this: “How ‘bout a trip to the Outer Rings? Zegema Beach…eh?” I know. It reads like nothing here. But that’s the thing, the line reading is straight style. It is an auditory explosion of panache.
Honorary Kylie Minogue in “Moulin Rouge” Award: Hope Sandoval. It warms my heart to think that way out there in the 23rd century moments of such sweet sorrow are still being scored to the dreamy serenade “Fade Into You” and the ravenously forlorn vocals of Ms. Sandoval. She's never seen, yet that irresistible voice still echoes through the centuries. Even if there's giant bugs trying to squash us, so long as Mazzy Star lives on, we'll be all right.
A Friday afternoon. Lunch at Potbelly Sandwich Shop. For once, they don’t have the acoustic strummer set up along the wall for musical accompaniment and are just piping in music. You’re eating your sandwich and reading your book. “I’ve Seen All Good People” by Yes comes over the speakers.
Your book vanishes. Your sandwich disappears. You’re no longer in Potbelly. You’ve been transported to the moment in “Almost Famous” when William Miller is granted entrance backstage to the Stillwater concert, the metaphorical curtain drawn as he whisked into the magical kingdom of which he has only dreamt, probably in class with his head buried in his desk when he’s pretended to be asleep so he doesn’t have to sit there silently, not interacting with people he doesn’t like. His own world was in color but this is Kodachrome, motherfucker. It’s the Land of Oz, except instead of munchkins there are roadies and instead of witches there are groupies and instead of The Great and Powerful Oz there’s Russell Hammond. “Don't surround yourself with yourself.” And William’s emitting this unbelieving beam because when a dream comes true you somehow never have time to stop and process that it’s come true. It just moves in one unyielding wave of exultation and it’s like you’re trying to learn how to surf on the fly but you don’t wipe out because some unspoken power of the universe is keeping you upright even as you feel yourself, physically and emotionally, tossing and turning with a joy that’s so forceful you feel nauseous without feeling ill.
And then the businessman yapping loudly on his smartphone about market development strategy and operating leverage awakens you from this involuntary memory and drags you back through the uninviting gates of the real world. You take a bite of your sandwich.
The last movie I watched before John Ford's “The Hurricane” was “Sunshine Superman”, a documentary about the godfather of BASE jumping, Dan Boenish, who gregariously declared that he and his fellow parachuting adventurers were beholden to the laws of nature, not the laws of man. That’s the sort of line that might make a certain sort of American wretch, but then you watch “The Hurricane” and realize that for all the bitching and bellyaching and filibustering up there on Capitol Hill, and even just down the road from your City Council hearing where everyone takes the previous week’s minutes so very, very seriously, all these regimented policymakers and rule-declaring authoritarians are just spitting in the wind. Every man, woman and child is beholden to the laws of nature first and there ain’t a damn thing any of us can do about it.
At the heart of “The Hurricane” is, of course, The Hurricane, referenced right away in the truly righteous opening sequence setting up the flashback to recount the story. As a passenger ship passes the desolate remnants of a one-time tropical paradise known as Manukura, a naive tourist who believes every word she reads in the travel folders wonders what happened to it. Dr. Kersaint (Thomas Mitchell), requisitely alcoholic on account of his obligatory humane cynicism, responds, wondrously, ominously, “It made the mistake of being born in the hurricane belt.” And when the storm arrives in the third act, Ford, working in conjunction with effects expert James Basevi, does an immaculate job escalating the tension, the wind picking up, the shutters rattling, before unleashing holy hell. Initially you marvel at the filmmaking achievement, the authenticity and audacity with which they concoct a storm onscreen, until eventually you realize the very real terror of the moment has foisted itself upon you. The storm doesn’t just tear down trees and flood beaches, it sends so much water crashing down on the church where natives cower and say their prayers that walls crumble and people are swept away. Even the faithful are not spared. There is no judgment passed. Spiraling tropical storms pay no mind to righteousness or depravity.
The story revolves around Terangi (Jon Hall), a convivial native, marrying Marama (Dorothy Lamour), and despite her obligatory premonition of doom and gloom, he proceeds to board the boat of Captain Nagle (Jerome Cowan) for whom he works as First Mate and sets sail for Tahiti. There, at a seedy watering hole, when a racist old fart taunts him, Terangi throws a punch and sends the racist old fart toppling to the floor. He gets six months in the slammer, a harsh penalty for anyone but particularly for an islander used to wide open spaces. He tries to escape. And he gets caught. He tries to escape. And he gets caught. He tries to escape. And he gets caught. Etc. And each escape attempt results in additional years added to his sentence.
Back on Manukura their imprisoned son’s fate ignites untold conversations regarding the penalty’s fairness; how the law must be upheld regardless; how the law is wielded willy-nilly by men playing god, and so on. In fact, there might be a few too many of these discussions, each one covering the same ground as before, absent fresh insight. Yet this repetitiveness makes its own point, illustrating the expanse of time men and women fritter away squabbling over semantics, trumping themselves up as the arbiters of all what is Right and Wrong.
This, of course, would seem to indicate The Hurricane's inevitable arrival as a harbinger of God’s justice, a Lordly slicing of all the red tape, a Fatherly smack to all the pompous officialdom, like The Great Earthquake in “San Francisco” for which Mr. Basevi also did the magnificently frightening effects. Yet such a viewpoint would discount the otherwise innocent natives of Manukura, those forced to submit to jurisdiction of the French when they turned up and imposed their rules. Right and Wrong and Good and Evil and Everything in-between, it doesn't much matter when the laws of nature choose to cash in.
That’s what makes this film’s happy ending feel less contrived than most. It isn’t the unwavering Laws of Hollywood demanding at least a few smiling faces so much as it is the random luck of the draw. And the concluding shot, a joyous swim into the sunset, takes a time-honored coda and twists it, reminding us that for all the terror nature inevitably unleashes, we cannot help but revel in its beauty.
The interwebs are alive with shouts and murmurs of the apparent Cannes Film Festival ordinance that all females must wear high heels on the red carpet, or else. The hella talented Emily Blunt, walking the red carpet on the French Riviera to promote “Sicario”, couldn’t take this footwear B.S. anymore and spoke about it. Twitter erupted. Cannes improbably became more supercilious. And so on. As it happens, Cinema Romantico’s sources were able to track down a letter sent by Emily Blunt’s PR team to the film festival’s directors in advance of her appearance. We have re-printed it below.
Dear Pierre Lescure and The French Association of the International Film Festival, I hope this letter finds you well. Emily cannot wait to attend Cannes! However, we were hoping you might acquiesce to one minor request. While Ms. Blunt respects your ultra-progressive policy forcing females to wear high heels on the red carpet lest they appear - egads! - un-ladylike, she wondered if you might do her a solid, just this once, and grant her the privilege of wearing flats for the premiere of Sicario. Her back has really been in a lot of pain this last year considering she had to carry Tom Cruise in “Edge of Tomorrow.” Thanks again! Sincerely,
The Artists Partnership
David Letterman, of course, was an irreverent late night talk show host on NBC, not a movie star, and that’s why his most memorable turn in a movie basically felt like an irreverent late night sketch on NBC. It was “Cabin Boy” and the irascible Letterman turned up for a walk off cameo as a man who wants to sell a monkey to Chris Elliott, Letterman's old protégé. The monkey, as it turns out, is merely a sock puppet. It’s that chancy kind of comedy that’s essentially attempting to be funny by rubbing your nose in how not funny it is. Succeed, and it’s cultish, maybe. Fail, and crickets. And a year later when David Letterman walked onto the stage at the Shrine Auditorium to host the 67th Academy Awards, he may as well have been wearing that sock puppet.
Oscar hosting is a tale told of woe and cataclysm. Letterman’s lone stint might have been the most cataclysmic of ‘em all. It was so legendarily terrible that Letterman himself would often make it the butt of jokes. And that, of course, is classic Letterman. He’s a man, it is well known, plagued by self-doubt and insecurity, and comically he thrived on it, particularly in moments when his worst jokes bombed. If a joke was awful, he'd return to it again and again, driving home its awfulness so insistently that you couldn't help but laugh. In fact, those were the moments I often laughed hardest. If he’d failed at the “Would you like to buy a monkey?” joke on NBC, he would have issued that same query to poor Paul at least 17 more times before show’s end.
Frankly, I can’t imagine how anyone thought David Letterman hosting the Oscars would not amount to exactly what it turned into. “(T)he ceremony went to the far side of blatantly meretricious blandness and made no pretense about its safe and self-protective conservatism,” wrote a most Brody-esque Richard Brody in the wake of the 2013 Academy Awards. “The shticky suffusions of show-biz tradition were replaced by a rigidly plasticized shell of industrial defensiveness that wore its bank-vault-like mentality up front.” That stuffiness, that resistance to (fear of) spontaneity, is precisely what Dave played against. He took “the rigidly plasticized shell” and conked them all over the head with it; because he’s not just flippant, he’s an adversarial wiseass.
Watching him in 1986 try and deliver a fruit basket to the headquarters of GE who had just bought NBC was incredible. He wore a Late Show letter jacket like he was a high school student on a class field trip. It was like the preamble for every GE joke unfurled on “30 Rock.” If anyone was going to be master of ceremonies at Hollywood's big party and not care what Hollywood thought it was David Letterman. Introducing Uma to Oprah, and Oprah to Uma, was the equivalent of that fruit basket, making the introduction ultra-awkward. He wasn’t there to cater to them, he was there to cater to us. No, no, no. He was there to cater to himself. That infamous Letterman “hee-hee” conveys, as it always does, self-amusement.
“If you were a guest who was a normal human being, you were fine — he’d be curious and ask thoughtful questions. But if you had airs? There was nothing more fun to watch than Letterman effortlessly deflate people with inflated senses of worth,” wrote Daniel Kellison for Grantland in recalling the years he spent working for Letterman, and that's exactly how his former boss hosted the Academy Awards. Everyone mocks the Oscars incessantly for being a bunch of self-important people getting dressed up to lavish each other with awards. Letterman treated it exactly as that and gleefully forced them all through his Worldwide Pants-ish wringer. Had he hosted like that in the present day, he would not have been a dud; he would have been a smart-aleck savior.
“Hope is a mistake,” declares Mad Max himself (Tom Hardy), a line modeled on Red Redding’s observation that “Hope is a dangerous thing.” And while Red was talking about the naïve optimism an incarcerate might carry of one day not seeing life through the prism of the penitentiary, he might as well have been talking about devout movie-goers cavorting off to the multiplexes each summer who so desperately hope for a film that transports rather than merely distracts like the endless spate of box office grabbing brand name drivel. And hope seems so perilous because as a concept it feels so tenuous. It’s inanimate, a test of faith. Hope is “something in our hearts.” Hope is “just over the horizon.” Hope so often becomes a figurative place, meaning it is accorded fantastical nicknames, monikers like “The Green Place”, which is what it goes by in “Mad Max: Fury Road” where “green” must seem so beguiling in an apocalyptic wasteland.
Ah, but hope in director George Miller’s film eventually proves itself less about going forward into the great unknown and more about looking back toward a familiar place. It’s voguish to declare that Hollywood summers are essentially apocalyptic wastelands of creativity on account of incessant familiarity, superhero movies and sequels of sequels of sequels. Yet that theory is not absolute. Rather than conjure an entirely new cinematic tentpole out of thin air, Miller returns to his cultish creations of the 70’s and 80’s, the “Mad Max” trilogy; and rather than move the series forward, he merely borrows its various parts to concoct a raucous engine for an updated eye-catching cinematic vehicle. There is no need to have intimate or even casual history with the previous films to enjoy “Fury Road.” It stands alone, and it stands out from the overstuffed lumbering Hollywood leviathans that throw money at automated ideas on an Excel spreadsheet. Miller strips away every narrative non-essential until that’s all left is the overwhelmingly ferocious thrill of the chase along with decisive proof that women and men were created equal.
“Fury Road” opens with an evocative and swift sequence of world-building, introducing a massive desert enclave, the Citadel, where the requisite villain Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) keeps the desperate populace on an H2O leash, regulating the fiercely precious water resources, only doling them on momentous occasions. Breathing through tubes, his face obscured by a punk rock Skeletor mask, we can barely make out what he's saying half the time, and so what? Words have hardly ever mattered in the “Mad Max” universe and so they are barely consequential here. Actions count.
Take our protagonist, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron). A high-ranking minion of Immortan Joe and at the wheel of a tanker truck on a gas-harvesting deployment, a mere fateful glance in her rearview mirror signals she’s gone rogue, absconding with Joe's so-called “breeders”, women he has enslaved to produce a male heir, one of whom (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley) is pregnant. Joe and his automobile cavalcade fire off in pursuit, kick-starting an incredibly furious two hour action movie cannonade. “Fury Road” is a Category Five chase movie, tantalizingly edited by Margaret Sixel to within an inch of coherence, exquisitely paced like a throbbing rock song, verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus, roaring with a tightly controlled mania before a brief downturn in the second act to quickly exposit goals and then exuberantly crescendo without overstaying its welcome. At times, every facet of the filmmaking process harmonizes in such symphonic grandeur that the sheer power of a film being made engulfs your senses.
It's basically a road movie, of course, and like any cross-country trip it reaches a fork, one that sets up for either a punishing trek across “the salt” into likely existentialism or back the way they came and into a requisite slam-bang third act. Miller steers them into the slam-bang third act, adhering to the law of its release date, yes, though this isn’t slam-bang for the sake of slam-bang. This is a genuine feminist uprising, an intentional assault on the guns and gasoline masochists disguised as slam-bang.
Not for nothing does Mad Max essentially get shunted aside in his own movie. He declares himself a survivalist but Imperator is a Latin word that effectively translates to Commander and that aptly summarizes Ms. Theron’s turn of quiet immensity. In a film of kinetic action and mind-boggling stunts, where a post film credit goes to a senior pyrotechnics technician because this is the sort of movie that blows shit up for real, the screen is commanded by its leading lady. Theron gives a modern day silent movie performance with grippingly expressive eyes, crossing the steely pre-serve glare of Maria Sharapova with the ferocious motherliness of Ellen Ripley. It’s the motor oil she smears on her face like black war paint, not the motor oil in the myriad of engines that makes this movie go.
“Fury Road” leans feminist, though I’m not sure Max does. Though he sees hope differently as the film ends, his survival instinct remains, and if he ran into Megan Fox fighting Michael Bay in Thunderdome in a fifth film, I’m not sure he wouldn’t align himself with whomever curried more favor. But then, that’s what makes him such a fair-minded arbiter; he’ll show respect to anyone who can hang, and even more toward someone who can outdo. Furiosa outdoes. The film ends with a figurative tip of the cap, him to her as he vanishes into the crowd, leaving her face, rising to glorious heights, as the last image we see. He’s been bested. You half-think George Miller is daring some blockbuster auteur to come and do the same.
The first shot of “Clouds of Sils Maria” finds Val, short for Valentine (Kristen Stewart), aboard a Eurorail, the camera shaking. Well, actually the camera is still; the train is causing the camera to shake. And this shaking ominously suggests a forthcoming shake-up in whatever movie world this is we are about to enter. Indeed, Val is the personal assistant of Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche), a famed actress on her way to a celebration honoring the writer, William Melchior, who helped trigger her upward professional trajectory. Alas, they learn Melchior has died, and he would probably be gleeful to learn his own death functions in the context of “Clouds of Sils Maria” as mere symbolism, the portent of our leading lady’s doom. A celebration becomes a memorial.
That memorial takes fairly overt form in a revival of the play that twenty-some years ago put Maria a on the map wherein she rivetingly played the part of a youthful ingénue in a complicated starry-eyed relationship with an older actress. Now, of course, the director wants Maria to reverse roles. Her former part will be played by JoAnn, a rising American star prone to fits of volatile public hysteria, played exquisitely by Chloe Grace Moretz with a kind of European art house spin on the Miley Cyrus phenomenon. She is fresh off some ginormous if vapid sci-fi flick and now embroiled in scandal as the other woman in an affair with an English writer who, frankly, doesn’t seem like he can keep up with her. Come to think of it, JoAnn more than a little resembles the off screen travails, fair or not (not), of one Kristen Stewart. You half expect that she will encounter the Kristen Stewart of “Twilight” in some sort of perverted cinematic séance.
It’s difficult to pinpoint precisely when reality, the old curmudgeonly term of the movie reviewing lexicon, departs “Clouds of Sils Marias.” When Val runs lines with Maria, director Olivier Assayas often enters the moment mid-rehearsal, with scripts tucked out of sight, a disorienting effect that means we can’t be certain if they are merely reciting dialogue or legitimately having a row, and therefore effectively eliciting a sensation of being both. Veracity blends with fiction, which is the eerie, wonderful plain on which this whole dreamy movie rests. After all, art, as Val lectures her employer, is an “interpretation of life that can be truer than life itself”, a line worthy of eye-rolls until you hear the way Ms. Stewart says it, with so much earnestness that it counteracts the naivety. “Clouds of Sils Maria” may be sentient but it never devolves into self-impressed self-awareness.
As with any film concerning the acting industry, “Clouds of Sils Marias” invites comparisons to the grand dame of showbiz satires “All About Eve”, even if they are far from the same film. That was a backstage drama dipped in battery acid, a schemer conniving to crush a starlet, the perpetual cycle of the performer. The fall from grace here, however, is inevitable rather than accelerated, a piercing and gloriously puzzling portrait of an actress’s careers suddenly becoming enveloped in the fog of age, emblemized quite insistently, but no less breathlessly, by the clouds of the title, the so-called Majola Snake, a kind of smoke ring that pours through the canyons of the Swiss Alps where they are hiding out.
Considering that Maria has re-ascended the stage in the wake of dressing up for a superhero movie, her character bears hallmarks of Michael Keaton’s Riggan Thompson, the focal point of last year’s Academy Award winning “Birdman.” Yet that was a film heightened to the point of grandiosity. Riggan’s daughter, Sam (Emma Stone), called him on the carpet, yes, to try provide counterweight to the opening shot of his levitation and all that sleight-of-hand (or not) entailed. Yet the film’s final shot seemed to suggest she believed he could fly, giving over to the illusion of the movie star, a deliberate sacrificing of the film’s final thread of tangibility. Val, however, is and remains the emotional and professional ballast of Maria, counseling and coddling her employer to remain in the play when she wants out. Val sees value in attacking the same work from a different vantage point, to opening one’s self up to another reading, to using art as a kind of working through, and when something happens to Val toward the second act's end, it intentionally feels as if that working-through has become unmoored.
The push & pull between these two women winds up as the film’s prominent feature, the question of who’s wisest being blurred. When Val proclaims that a performance in a dunderheaded Hollywood blockbuster can carry just as much spiritual weight as a hoity-toity art film, it’s incredible to witness not only for the way in which this hoity-toity art film is going to bat for dunderheaded Hollywood blockbusters, but for the zealous optimism with which Val professes it. In the end, it’s not simply the years that have been automatically stripped from Maria, it’s the ideals, and the idea that we accumulate wisdom with age disappears like the landscape to the Majola Snake.
At its core "Skyjacked" comes across as just another mid-flight thriller, packaged with spare parts of dozens of other bad-stuff-happens-on-a-plane midnight movies screened during the daytime. There is a bomber aboard a plane sending ominous messages about he wants. There is an assortment of passengers whose respective plights are utilized to heighten the tension, such as a Senator (Walter Pidgeon) communicating with the President and - wait for it - a pregnant woman (Mariette Hartley) not due for a month who, well, obviously. And the Captain, Henry O'Hara (Charlton Heston), who was once married to the chief stewardess, Angela Thatcher (Yvette Mimieux), and still has feelings for her it seems despite now being married to someone else which taken in conjunction with "Airport" last week begs the question: Do movies think airline employees can only fraternize with one another? Do they think that's in the employee handbook? If all this sounds non-promising, potential viewer, refrain from fret for "Skyjacked", shockingly, is something more.
Consider a shot midway through the film that finds our skyjacker holding aloft a live grenade. Director John Guillermin sets it so we see the live grenade in the foreground of the frame and to the right while the pregnant woman cowers in the background to the left. By placing them in the shot together he's essentially acknowledging that they exist in this same universe and that the threat to her is real. She's not just being trucked in to add additional drama. Yes, the baby will have to burst forth before the movie ends but the moment itself is handled with the bare minimum of saccharine melodrama, opting instead for a surprisingly authentic edge. When that woman is pushing, she's pushing, and when Angela is coaching, she's coaching. It's for real. So's "Skyjacked".
Maybe that tone can be traced back to the beginning, not providing broad background details for each important character before the plane lifts off, but basically going right to liftoff. Morsels of information are divvied up in the air, and mostly after a young passenger, Elly (Susan Dey), goes to the lavatory and finds a message scribbled in lipstick, like Heath Ledger's Joker has been there. It says: "Bomb on plane. Divert to Anchorage Alaska. No Joke, No Tricks. Death." When Elly exits the bathroom to tell of what she's seen, she leans backs and says, wistfully but honestly, "I've never thought about dying." And normally we wouldn't think about dying during an exercise in genre filmmaking, yet we do. The possibility of anyone - everyone - dying feels palpable in filmmaking that pointedly refuses to take the edge off.
Consider the forced landing that occurs in Anchorage. Yes, it's dramatic. Yes, the captain has to make it happen amidst punishing rain. But Guillermin puts no music on the soundtrack. It becomes Disaster Movie Verité. You'll want to clutch the armrest you don't have. The villain is just as convincing. Eventually revealed as Sgt. Jerome K. Weber, a Vietnam vet who has apparently been rendered shell-shocked, he is played with a truly frightful flop sweat and palpably itchy trigger finger by James Brolin. His ploy, an ode to so many of the gloriously nutball ruses of the skyjacker's era, is to take the plane to Russia where he will defect, presumably with all sorts of American secrets as well as an American senator in tow. It's telling, however, that this storyline is never played to maximize the Cold War tension that very much would have been present in a movie theater in 1972. The Russians, as near as we can tell, view Sgt. Jerome K. Weber as derisively as the Yanks. He's got a screw loose. Everyone knows it.
Throughout the film Weber returns to a flashback, a la Ted Striker, of a military ceremony where he parades in front of his fellow men and women in uniform and greets a commanding officer to receive some sort of commendation for glory or valor or some such. Eventually, though, it dawns on us that this flashback isn't really a flashback at all; it's a dream sequence. He fantasizes the same scene, in fact, sitting on the Russian tarmac, expecting a hero's welcome, only to soon realize it's not to be. And his delusion doesn't seem far off from the Harlequin delusion of Captain O'Hara, remembering, as it were, a happier time with Angela, one that might not have ever existed and for certain won't ever take place in whatever future is to come.
Odd as it may sound, "Skyjacked" made me think of Lindi Ortega's song "Waitin' On My Luck To Change", a glorious country ballad that puts its narrator aboard a jetliner, a place away from "down below where it's just trouble and pain." Up above, we can dream of something, anything better. Then, the plane lands. Reality returns. Dreams wilt and die. Vaya con dios.
There’s the immaculately comical moment in “Bowfinger” when the titular character and his ramshackle crew are filming Jiff, the hapless double for mega-star Kit Ramsey, for an action shot on a rush hour L.A. freeway. He has to run from one side of the interstate to the other, dodging cars, across the median, to reach the arms of the lady he loves. “That seems kinda dangerous,” Jiff earnestly observes. Bobby Bowfinger laughs. “No, no, no,” he says, “we have professional stuntmen doing the driving so you’ll be completely safe.” It’s technically funny, of course, because, obviously, they are not professional stuntmen, they are normal everyday L.A. drivers suddenly dealing with a maniac running through traffic.
It’s ironic, isn’t it? It makes me think of “Who’s Harry Crumb?”, the oh-right-I-sorta-remember-that John Candy comedy from the 80’s in which the star gets caught crawling in air ducts with a considerable breeze that generates hijinks. My Dad loved that detail, that a ludicrous John Candy comedy was the only movie that ever actually showed air ducts being put to their intended use while so many action films sacrificing joy for solemnity would revel in the air duct ruse solely to advance plot. And it’s no less incredible that an absurdist romp like “Bowfinger” would be the movie to willingly indulge the fantasy that every driver on a freeway is, like, you know, just a commuter.
It’s easy to look at a movie car chase and immediately deduce its inherent fantasy. I mean, take my favorite movie car chase, “Ronin”, the one through the streets of Paris that spurs the third act and contains our dueling automobiles going against traffic for a while. Find it on the Youtubes and the first comment is calling it out over an inane inaccuracy. Them’s the movies these days. You make them to move the world and people watch them to spot continuity errors. It’s so much fun!!! I remember someone telling me, derisively, with a roll of the eyes, that the cars coming in when they were roaring down the tunnel against, as stated, the traffic looked suspiciously far apart, like the director was cuing them up off screen on a headset. And I guess he probably was. Wasn’t he? Or was he not? Or were they, like “Bowfinger”, only the illusion of professional stuntmen? (I, of course, don’t mean this literally, only abstractly, but only abstractly in the context of cinematic truthfulness, by which I mean illusory as the reality.)
This brings me to “Ronin’s” most unlucky extra. What if his name’s Martin? What if he’s a contractor from Chartres? What if he had to take a trip up to Paris to pick up a few supplies? What if he’d just picked them up and was starting on his way back home? What if he was just listening to some MC Solaar and daydreaming about that mademoiselle in the Bugatti EB110 whose eye he’d briefly caught?
And then, suddenly, a car zooms past to his left, going the wrong way, just as another car swerves up alongside him to his right. “What the-”
Since I could finally both drive and get into R-rated movies in 1995, it doubled as the year in which I fell head over heels in love for the experience of Going To The Movies. And so, here in the future in 2015, we will periodically re-visit a handful of the offerings to which I first paid homage in various multiplex cathedrals of Des Moines, Iowa.
----------
It’s movie obsessive common knowledge that Tony Scott’s “True Romance” co-conspirator Quentin Tarantino did uncredited rewrites to Scott’s 1995 submarine epic “Crimson Tide”, named for a football team that then was not quite as overbearing as it is now. Mr. Tarantino’s re-writes pertained not to sonar and periscopes, because that's not Q.T.'s wheelhouse, but rather to additions of pop culture, marking it a tad more accessible and a bit more humorous. One of those additions appears near the start when a couple submarine officers earnestly discuss commanders in submarine movies. They mention “The Enemy Below”, which pit Robert Mitchum as an American sub captain locked in deep sea battle with Curd Jurgens as a German sub captain. They mention “Run Silent Run Deep” in which Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy are both Americans aboard the same sub who must find a way to work together. And while both these movies inform “Crimson Tide”, rest assured, Tony Scott, the maverick who gave birth to Maverick, goes his own way.
“A maximalist,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her New York Times obituary of Tony Scott, “(he) used a lot of everything in his movies: smoke, cuts, camera moves, color.” Truth. Mr. Scott never met a formal trick he wouldn’t subsequently pile like so much coleslaw on top of a cinematic sandwich that already had two pounds of meat and fries. “Busy” never really captured his aesthetic; his camera was a day trader high on whatever you’d like and everything else. Still, what often got lost amidst his impressive deployments of frenzied style were the epic confrontations between characters. Tony Scott loved confrontations. We remember “Top Gun” for its flash and dash and Ray Bans, of course, but we remember it just as fondly for Maverick vs. Ice and Maverick vs. Jester and Maverick vs. Viper and Maverick vs. Himself. We remember Christopher Walken squaring off with Dennis Hopper in an incredible verbal tete a tete. Then there’s “Crimson Tide.”
In theory, “Crimson Tide” is a showdown between the United States and a Russian ultra-nationalist, between opposing submarines lurking in the depths of the sea. Of course, it’s not really about any of those Cliff Notes. What it’s really about is the two primary officers aboard the U.S. Naval nuclear sub, the USS Alabama (“Go ‘bama! Roll tide!”), Captain Frank Ramsey and his brand new handpicked Executive Officer Ron Hunter. It’s about slowly escalating confrontation between these two men born of an order rendered incomplete on account of a technical glitch that causes mutinies and reams and reams of splendid shouting matches. More than that, though, it’s about a confrontation between two actors, Gene Hackman raising hell as Ramsey and Denzel Washington maintaining impassioned fastidiousness as Hunter.
To be sure, Scott gussies up his films with plenty of bells and whistles, not to mention lathering it up with a prototypical booming Hans Zimmer score. There are depth charges and catastrophic leaks and missiles fired and all sorts of other traditional action-packed entrees served. Yet it never comes across as more than Simpson/Bruckheimer contracted scaffolding to provide a place where two all-world thespians can unleash verbal torrents, both loudly or quietly. It’s a friendly, hella good reminder that so often the only energy source a film requires to power it to ascendant heights is a couple acting titans. And this is why the film ends not with more missiles fired and not with WWIII, but with Hackman and Washington seated across from one another discussing Lipizzan Stallions.
It also ends with Ramsey recommending to a Naval Tribunal that Hunter be given command of his own boat, and it’s not difficult to read this conclusion as Hackman passing the baton of his own role on to his co-star. “When threatened, Hackman retreats to his glasses and clipboard,” Steven Hyden wrote in his January retrospective of the actor, “the accoutrements of command. And how does Denzel respond? I DO NOT RECOGNIZE YOUR AUTHORITY. Like that, Denzel Washington becomes Gene Hackman right before your eyes. And Denzel held on to that role in subsequent movies. Flash forward 20 years and it’s Denzel playing daddy to Mark Wahlberg in 2 Guns.”
Eh, yes and no. I'd agree with the first part, not the second. Yes, Washington has often assumed the Ramsey-ish role of charismatic elder, dealing with or imparting wisdom to or screaming at a co-star, but Wahlberg vs. Washington is assuredly not Washington vs. Hackman. Nor was Ethan Hawke in “Training Day”, a part working away from Washington’s King Kong postulating and a performance that didn't win even if its character did. Angelia Jolie took a turn as Washington's protégé in “The Bone Collector” and though she won an Academy Award a year later this was still before Angie had cracked the Jolie Movie Star Code. Ryan Reynolds in “Safe House” is like watching a Biloxi Shucker flail away against a Major League pitcher.
“For more than 30 years,” Hyden wrote, “people bought movie tickets to watch Hackman take charge.” In “Crimson Tide”, Hackman took charge and Washington had the cojones to wrestle that charge away. And now, twenty years later, Washington continues roaming Hollywood evermore intent to take overblown thrillers like “The Equalizer” in an increasingly woebegone effort to find someone willing and able to wrest charge away from him. I fear in twenty years, he'll still be searching.
Several times throughout “Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck” director Brett Morgen pairs audio diaries of the film’s titular subject with animated re-creations, evoking the sensation of an actual person’s life documented in the pages of a comic book, a deliberate and effective blurring of the myth that has taken hold of Cobain's story ever since his suicide twenty-one years ago. By ending his own life in 1994, Cobain, the icon who founded alt-rock legend Nirvana, also seemed to lose ownership of it, transformed into a pariah or a messiah or anything in-between, whatever term best fit the narrative being spun. But by creating a documentary almost entirely out of Cobain’s own personal effects, his diary entries and drawings and personal recordings and home videos, Morgen nobly seeks to re-claim Kurt Cobain’s life as his own.
As a child, Cobain was energetic to the point of unruly we learn in talking head interviews with his family, and that problematic energy was dealt with, if never “solved”, through a series of medications and trading off between homes of his divorced parents and other relatives. It’s venerable cliché that rock ‘n’ roll saves our rock ‘n’ roll saviors, and yet the archives of young Kurt go a long way in arguing this as truth. His artwork, in particular, advances in aggression as he advances in age, such as a truly intense sketch of a red-faced Charlie Brown appearing to strangle his famous beagle with a leash. It’s only a snapshot yet still a glimpse into a psyche, a re-working of the familiar insecurities of an adolescent idol as someone who might just as easily wound up roaming the halls at Columbine. The pictures he drew and the words he wrote all point to a percolating anger and insecurity that he struggled to control.
Nirvana’s game-changing music gets no explicative assessment. No rock historians are consulted to contextualize Nirvana’s place in the pantheon or even to clarify that “Bleach” begat “Nevermind” which begat “In Utero.” You sense that sort of exposition would bore Cobain to sighs and eye-rolling and eventually thunking his head down on the table like a kid in class who would rather be anywhere, which is precisely the sort of disposition he is shown emitting in interviews, Marshawn Lynch long before Marshawn Lynch turned every interview into a meta (non) statement on their inherent vapidity. Fed up with a question about putting his music into perspective, Cobain simply replies “They know.” As in, his fans know what the music means to them, and “Montage of Heck” essentially allows that to function as the entire mission statement involving his oeuvre.
What it makes clear instead is how music gave Cobain an avenue to salvage his sanity, a way to harness his frustrations and subsequently express them. Those frustrations with his peers and with his family and with society primarily boils down to a hatred of inauthenticity. He may as well be the protagonist of “The Chocolate War.” Whether or not you find this decrying of the world's abject fakery overblown, however, the fact remains that Cobain’s meteoric rise in the music world meant that after leaving so many apparent phonies quaking in his alt dust, he was only bound to encounter that many more phonies on his way to the top. And that’s the truly tragic paradox that “Montage of Heck” captures so astutely, how the music that rescued him only accelerated and accounted for his inevitable doom. And that’s what ultimately makes his relationship with Courtney Love the movie’s most moving, if not most profound.
Before we progress, let’s remember that “Montage of Heck” was given life by the Cobain camp, including his daughter Francis Bean and her estranged mother, Ms. Love. What they asked for, demanded, were or were not okay with, who knows? Surely not me, and so perhaps certain events were portrayed in a particular - that is, favorable - light. But then isn’t that the nature of all events? As Cobain’s profile rises, the film often contrasts articles being written about him and his personal life with Cobain’s own diary entries. They do not always mesh. Nor do the home videos taken of Kurt & Courtney’s infamous three month hiatus from the surrounding world when they locked themselves in their apartment and shot up with heroin for three months mesh with the oft-perceived notion that she was the negative weight who actively aroused his demise.
Strange as it may sound, I’m not sure I’ve seen a more beautiful a passage so far in a movie this year as Kurt & Courtney, home alone and drugged up and spaced out. That’s not to suggest I condone becoming a semi-permanent junkie or to suggest it glamorizes their behavior. But the videos as presented seem insistently clear in their happiness, lovebirds of a grunge aesthetic, completely out of it but totally in touch with each other’s soul. “Our combined fusion can bend spoons,” he writes to her and I have no reason to doubt this assertion. In this light it comes across as a considered rejection of Cobain’s rocket ship to fame, even a little bit prophetic. In early 1992 it's difficult not to suspect he saw the writing on the wall, and maybe he just wanted one more prolonged episode in the company of himself and his loved one before it inevitably all went up in smoke.
Morgen refrains from concluding the film with Cobain's death, and that's the right decision. This isn't about a seminal rock star dying; it's about a seminal rock star living and what drove him to death. All in all this is all he was. Everything that came after was someone else's version.
The Ultron of the Age referred to in the title of the new “Avengers” movie is an artificially intelligent mechanized villain with the deliciously wicked speaking voice of James Spader, hell bent, as he must be, on global destruction for the simple reason that he looks at earth, sees a cesspool of anti-intellectuals and declares they all need to die since they can’t evolve. The irony is not lost. Writer/director Joss Whedon’s film, like so many superhero box office threshers before it, is beholden to its creator’s vision up to a point before it must revert to the immutable structural requirements of the superhero movie, one of which involves a so-called “action packed” third act over which a thick smog of sameness settles, numbing the senses to any preceding goodwill, dissolving into CGI pollutant. “You dummy,” the masses will declare. “It’s ‘just a movie.’ The people want CGI fistfights and robotic multitudes.” Fair enough. But ask yourself, faithful consumer, what kind of review Ultron himself might pen of the movie in which he stars? “Evolve, you stupid movies!” I imagine him shouting as he pounds his robot hands on the laptop. “EVOLVE!!!”
“Age of Ultron” opens in the midst of an action sequence, all the varying Avengers taking turns in the spotlight to wield their respective superpowers, a showcase returned to almost verbatim in the third act, a telling gesture that illustrates how the movie moves in a straight, unchanging line despite its abundance of absolutely every-freaking-thing and that every-freaking-thing means Whedon struggles to find ways to pack it all in. Knowing this, he simply halts the narrative to just, like, show the stuff people paid to see. “Shot of Thor wielding his hammer? Check! Shot of Captain America utilizing his shield? Check! Shot of Tony Stark making witty wisecrack? Check!” It’s so absurdly itemized. When you’re writing a screenplay off a studio-issued checklist, well, your ability to tell a complete story is severely compromised.
Still, like the first “Avengers”, Whedon slyly finds way to include his preferred brand of character and whimsy, proffering a bounty of glorious quips that take shots at movie clichés, American foreign policy and even occasionally feel as if they were leftovers from the “Mystery Men” buffet. “I totally support your Avenging” says Linda Cardellini in an incredible off-kilter sequence re-purposed from the fragments of humdrum domestic dramas. It finds the Avengers laying low at the isolated country homestead of Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), and you momentarily glimpse an alternate reality where Whedon made a relaxed “Avengers” movie entirely at his home, a la “Much Ado About Nothing.”
Even better is the auxiliary romance of genuinely intimate grandeur between Dr. Bruce Banner (a wonderful Mark Ruffalo) being coaxed out of his Hulk-ness by Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), the Fay Wray to his Kong. An early moment in which she eases him off the brink momentarily transcends all the computerized pummeling around them. Yet it never achieves a genuine resolution, a subplot told in jump cuts rather than a full arc. This also plagues Scarlet Witch, embodied in a not accidentally bewitching performance by Elizabeth Olson whose vexed smile is the film’s finest “effect”, a character who’s a straight-up enemy, until she’s suddenly an ally if for no other reason than inevitable sequel set-up, proper character trajectory and payoffs falling by the wayside. The bottom line trumps all. There was supposedly a longer cut of this film and no doubt character building moments were scrapped, cost-cutting like an overly expensive oceangoing vessel doomed to sink before it even leaves port.
It signals a corporate mentality, an insistence on the status quo, that too often takes over, and that goes for The Avengers themselves. “That’s not against bylaws,” says Captain America to Dr. Bruce Banner, and all you can think is “bylaws”? The Avengers have bylaws? Like some Fortune 500 company with Monday morning meetings? Maria Hill (Colbie Smulders) strolls around in tight skirts and heels like the CEO of Avengers Inc.
Tony Stark and his alter ego Iron Man, still the most interesting character in this universe, often seems baffled by the white collars posing as superheroes. “Please be a secret door,” he says at one point, feeling a wall, evoking the sensation of a man who wants to flee his own situation (and Downey Jr., paradoxically locked in and out to lunch, evokes the same thing). Ultron, in fact, is spawned because of Stark, so desperate to outsource his and his pals’ Avenging to an A.I. entity, likely so he can return to “the revels” he adores so much. This creates the oddly un-commented upon juxtaposition of The Avengers fighting to rescue humanity from their own hubris. Stark’s responsible, yet hardly made to pay for it, which would be really, really funny except that in an often funny movie this is the one detail it somehow does not realize is funny.
Movies like this, of course, are not supposed to take place in the real world, which is fine because this one definitely does not. These Avengers and their principal enemy are more like gods squabbling and fighting on some distant CGI mountaintop, claiming to care, in their respective ways, about the “humanity” down in the cheap expensive seats watching this testament to excess, but really having no more general interest in us than in the compensation we provide to further their brand.
Released in 1970 at the dawn of so-called New Hollywood, “Airport” was generally viewed as something of a dinosaur, a holdover from the stuffiness of studio overlords, a Cecil B. DeMille film if it used the text of Arthur Hailey rather than Scripture. It got nominated for a bunch of Oscars, sure, and even won one, but that, it’s easy to suspect, was on account of the Academy’s good ol’ boys rather than any kind of true merit. It was, after all, a “ridiculous” movie, as the esteemed Roger Ebert noted in his review, a review of disagreeableness. And yet he writes: “on some dumb fundamental level, ‘Airport’ kept me interested for a couple of hours.” The film hit theaters in March but that’s merely because this was before “Jaws” changed the landscape of summer movie release schedules. Today, “Airport” would have dropped in mid-May, right between superhero epics. It would be called “cornball” and “cliched”. These labels would not be incorrect. Still, on some dumb fundamental level, it keeps you interested, and isn’t “dumb” and “fundamental” the level where we want most of our summer blockbusters to play?
What draws you in is not the mega-deluxe spectacle but the situation, and the people subsequently involved in it. Granted, none of these people are particularly interesting in any insightful ways, but in these sort of movies, melodrama, not insight, is the prime requirement. And melodrama is achieved with a score that bounces scene to scene, second to second, from obviously ominous to ridiculously romantic. Plus, since it’s 1970, important conversations take place in wood paneled rooms rather than bland white offices and everyone can smoke, in the airport and in the airplanes, and important conversations always look better in front of wood panels with cigarettes.
Set primarily at a fictional Chicagoland airport on an incessantly snowy night, the film, directed by George Seaton, encompasses a swath of stories so wide it constantly resorts to split screens (and occasionally, split screens within split screens) to account for all its characters and their places and plights. For most of the film, our surrogate is Mel Bakersfield, airport manager, played, crucially, by a member of Tinseltown’s old guard, Burt Lancaster, with a tousled head of hair harmonizing with his burned-out face. His marriage is requisitely on the rocks and about to come to head, of course, on the exact same dadgum night as “the worst storm in six years.” Wouldn’t ya know it?! That storm has caused a jetliner to become stranded on the airport's most vital runway, clogging the arteries of the flight schedules, and he has to find a way to un-bury it from the snow all while dueling with the airport’s board of directors who want to shut the whole place down because of complaints lodged by neighbors. Thank God he has Tanya Livingston, the Trans Global Airlines Passenger Agent (Jean Seberg) with whom he’s having an affair! Without her arms to nefariously fall into, whatever would he do?!
“Airport”, it must be said, is not merely regressive in its filmmaking and storytelling techniques but in its sexual attitudes. It seems not only apologetic toward but encouraging of affairs in the workplace. It’s not just Mel, it’s Captain Vernon Demerest (Dean Martin), who might be married but is having an affair with a stewardess, Gwen (Jacqueline Bisset), who is, as she must be, pregnant with his child. Their last scene in the film, in fact, finds Demerest literally turning his back on his wife and to stay by Gwen’s side, and this is intended as loving and heroic. Yikes. Hell, the only man who truly seems faithful to his spouse is Guerrero (Van Heflin), and he’s the villain, boarding a plane captained by Demerest bound for Rome with a bomb in his briefcase, ready to blow it sky high to collect insurance for the wife he’s failed. “It’ll be like it used to be,” he tells Inez (Maureen Stapleton) which can only mean that it will never be like it used to be.
Guerrero’s smuggling of the bomb onboard, harkening back to those wistful days when you didn’t have to take off your shoes at security and when you could saunter onto a 707 with explosives, is meant to lend the crucial layer of gravitas, to make this all count for something. Really, though, a kind of gravitas is added by Guerrero’s seatmate, Ada Quonsett, a chronic stowaway, played by Helen Hayes in a performance that earned her an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She won that Oscar over Karen Black for “Five Easy Pieces” which…uh…well…yeah…maybe not so much. Though that’s no knock on Ms. Hayes, clearly best in show, playing the part like a devotee of airport rack novels who has decided to insinuate herself as a character in one. In a way, she emerges as the film’s true hero, standing up, sort of, not only to the bomber but to the dastardly airlines, charging so much and putting people through so many hoops and getting even rather than getting mad.
Her tangential wrap-up certainly is more satisfying than the film’s. “Airport” works best as set-up and it sets things up for, like, 115 minutes. It’s pretty impressive. But once the bomb goes off and a hole gets blown in the plane and Dean Martin, acting so laconic that the whole performance comes across like a sly rejection of “stakes”, is forced to blindly land the plane, well, the film just sort of sinks into the marshes if only because I viewed “Airport” through the prism of time and, frankly, “Airplane!” did this ending better.
There’s a scene late in “Iron Man 2” when the titular character’s bodyguard, Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau), and, uh, personal assistant, Natasha Romanova cum Black Widow (Scarlett Johannson), rush to the factory where the principal villain is hiding out. Naturally the principal villain has numerous nameless flunkies stationed to provide resistance. What transpires more or less crystallizes what has transpired with the modern American summertime blockbuster.
Happy is essentially a character of a different era. A one-time boxer, he harkens back to a period when prizefighting was king, and pugilists went man-to-man in classical slugfests. “Boxing is about respect,” Scrap Dupris once opined, “about getting it for yourself and taking it away from the other guy.” And it’s just that sort of physical exercise in respect that Happy engages upon arrival at the principal villain’s facility. He steps forward to confront the first line of opposition, and the two men engage in a tough, all-out heavyweight title fight consolidated into a single round.
Black Widow, on the other hand, while based on a character dating back all the way to the sixties in the Marvel universe, exists in “Iron Man 2” of the modern movie universe, the place where suspension of disbelief has never been higher and violent tussles have never been easier and CGI has never been more {yawns – stretches}. While Happy is in the midst of a life and death struggle, she’s in the midst of special effects ballet, leaping to and fro, ducking, dodging, dancing, and dispatching three, four, maybe five times the foes of her accomplice, mowing ‘em down like they were little rubber ducks in a carnival air rifle game. And when Happy finally vanquishes his opponent, he looks up, beaming at a job well done, having truly earned this victory, and ready to celebrate with his corner. Of course, his corner, having already cleaned the rest of the house, is long gone. What’s next?
When it comes to these superhero summertime tentpole cabarets, it’s always, “what’s next?” It’s never, “hey, what about this right here, right now?”, as evinced by the decision to green light Marvel movies into the year 4545. Or is that just the interwebs frothing at the mouth? Eh, the truth, as it usually does, likely lies somewhere in the median between the sidewalk of THINK PIECE: MOVIES ARE DYING and the footpath of MOVIE CRITICS ARE PRETENTIOUS SNOBS!
Mark Harris, as he so often does, did an exemplary job detailing the film industry’s “addiction to franchises”. “Movies are no longer about the thing,” he wrote, “they’re about the next thing, the tease, the Easter egg, the post-credit sequence, the promise of a future at which the moment we’re in can only hint.” His piece is far more comprehensive than just this observation, of course, branching out to examine the entire industry, but essentially boils down to “(t)he notion that the movie (or even the idea for the movie) should come first is quaint.”
Richard Brody, ever the contrarian, the man who could see your article about the Iowa River flowing to the Mississippi and raise you an eloquent, wordy, oddly convincing take that, no, it actually flows to the Missouri, took polite offense. “In decrying the great success of franchises and the modest success of the humanistic movies that he admires, Harris seems to be writing in an echo chamber—as if a movie that doesn’t open on three thousand screens, doesn’t cost a hundred million dollars, and doesn’t make a hundred million, doesn’t really count. He’s wrong. What counts is the movie, whether it’s seen by a few thousand viewers or by millions, and what makes a movie count (whether it’s seen by millions or thousands) is the critical judgment that asserts that it counts and shows why it counts.”
I remember seeing “The Dark Knight”, the middle film of Christopher Nolan’s Herculean trilogy, a film that always had one eye on its next film, and the man sitting next to me flipping out – wigging out – over the moment when Batman’s Batmobile suddenly became the Batcycle. You might’ve thought Jesus appeared in a plume of smoke. He loved it. You might surmise that Brody himself is writing an echo chamber, like he’s talking merely about himself and Anthony Lane and the Lords of The New Yorker telling you, Average American Without A Film Studies Degree Who Clearly Knows Nothing, what’s good and what’s bad. He’s not. He’s writing about the audience. No, no, no, no. He’s writing about every single audience member. He’s writing about the dude sitting next to me at “The Dark Knight”.
Audience members so routinely profess to hate film critics, so long as the film critics disagree with what the audience members think, but if you buy a ticket you retain the right to form a critical evaluation yourself. That dude sitting next to me at “The Dark Knight” didn't pen a tome regarding his love of said film, but his reaction made clear what he felt “critically” in that individual moment - that is, woo-hoo!!!!! And those individual moments are now what exclusively make these superhero summertime tentpole cabarets.
Ours is a time of GIFs and Vines. Ours is a time of Tweets that bear no meaning yet carry the weight of our respective worlds. Ours is a time of instants and impressions. Ours is a time of iPhones in place of cameras, snapping 200 pictures of the thing in front of us instead of taking time to spiritually inhale it. They make movies on iPhones now, you know. No, they don't make superhero summertime tentpole cabarets on iPhones (yet), but they may as well. They're really no different than scrolling through your iPhone camera roll, never stopping, just going and going, next, next, next, next, next, next, wait, what about that one? No time! NEXT!!!
Superhero summertime tentpole cabarets are not simply produced at light speed, they move each and every one themselves at a speed akin to Black Widow working her way through so many Marvel versions of the red uniformed Star Trekkers, rendering the precious critical buzzword “stakes” immaterial, always on the look out for what’s next, for the next special effect, the next bit of eye-popping flummery, the next Batcycle in place of the Batmobile.
Black Widow's 30 microseconds of ass-kicking is like our present day world, its accelerator accidentally getting stuck in “Ludicrous Speed” sometime around Apple's invention of The App Store, gone before we really had time to take it in. But if you watch these movies and focus on Here and Now as opposed to What's Next?, well, I promise that you'll see Happy Hogan over here on the periphery really working up a sweat, really laying it on the line.
I don't really remember “The Dark Knight Rises” even though “The Dark Knight Rises” was EPIC™. But I do remember Anne Hathaway's momentous mouthing of “please” in “The Dark Knight Rises”. Forever, wrote Emily Dickinson, is composed of nows, and if these movies keep composing enough of those nows maybe they really can last forever. Maybe.
